Larry Brody's Guide to Writing for the Medium Everyone Loves to Hate

Hey, Kids, It’s TV Network Apocalypse Time!

Aha! The world is going to end this year. Just not in the way we expected:

So here’s the deal. According to Toni Fitzgerald of MediaLife, broadcast viewing is continuing its slide. With the exception of NBC, which is up 23% in the ratings so far this season, the broadcast networks are down a total of 11% among adults 18-49. (Ooh, that’s TVWriter™’s demo. We’re so damn significant!)

The combined rating of all the networks is 11.8 in that all-important (cuz they/you/we are the ones advertisers think buy everything and they could be right) demographic. That’s down from 13.3 at this time last year, and everybody was bitching then.

Is this just more of the same old, same old network misery, a continuation of the trend that’s been going on for most of this century? Or is something else happening here? Is the latest crop of new network series so horrific that Television Executive Rapture is at hand? Why can’t f**king TV be better?

You know, now that we’ve started seeing this as a TV End of Days we’re feeling kind of buoyed up. Happy. It’s the image of TV Execs vanishing, just popping out of existence with a whoosh! of air rushing into fill the void. Kinda like a television working drone’s dream come true, you know?